Piers Morgan Calls 2021 Oscars a ‘Howlingly Dull Trainwreck,’ ‘Breathtakingly Boring’ Amid Low Ratings
Piers Morgan has made a career out of his exaggeratedly negative opinions. Now, he’s weighing in on the 2021 Oscars. To be fair, Morgan doesn’t necessarily seem alone in this opinion, per the ratings and online reaction. Here’s what the Daily Mail editor had to say about “the most unwatchable Academy Awards in history.”
The 2021 Oscars
This year’s award show took place at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, California. Morgan made sure to mention that he would have “been genuinely more entertained if [he] actually just watched trains coming and going.” And the evening went on without a host — another facet Morgan felt added to the failure of the evening.
According to Variety, the Oscars ratings were at a record low this year with an average of 9.85 million viewers watching on Sunday. That’s 58.3% fewer than the previous year. Additionally, the show received only a 1.9 rating from the key demographic (adults age 18-49).
‘There were no big movies to celebrate’ — Piers Morgan
One of the biggest issues Morgan took with the evening was the list of nominated movies. He felt there were “no big movies to celebrate.”
“The Best Picture winner Nomadland grossed just $2.5 million, meaning pretty much nobody watched it,” he wrote in his opinion piece. “It’s a beautifully made film, and Frances McDormand gives a typically superb performance. But the scene where she literally sh*ts into a bucket could have been a metaphor for its box office popularity.”
The talking head feels the list of nominations should reflect films that were commercially successful, even in this uniquely affected year when “commercial success” looked entirely different compared to previous years.
“Like most of the other honoured movies, Nomadland had a serious, moralising and slightly depressing theme to it,” he wrote. “I don’t doubt the quality of the filmmaking or the acting, but the Oscars shouldn’t be an annual celebration of niche downbeat movies that make the acting profession purr at the wonder of its own stagecraft with no regard for commercial success – they should be a celebration of movies that people actually watch and which, God forbid, are actually entertaining.”
Piers Morgan on the Best Actor ending
Morgan, of course, commented on the anti-climactic ending to the evening. The Best Actor award was moved to the last award of the night.
“Cynics believed they did this to exploit feverish anticipation that the late Chadwick Boseman had posthumously won the coveted Actor gong which would provide a highly emotional denouement to the show,” he wrote.
But the award went to Anthony Hopkins.
“This was the right decision – by common critics’ consent he gave the best and most powerful performance of the year in The Father,” he wrote.
As viewers recall, Hopkins wasn’t present to accept the award, and he didn’t appear on video, either. Morgan writes that the actor’s agent revealed that he was asleep at home in Wales by that point in the program.
“It was a comically unexciting conclusion to a mind-numbingly tedious night,” he wrote.
